Factorio Forums

Hello
I am trying to run a multiplayer server on Windows, and had been hosting it from within my client with little issue (friend 1000 miles away had some stuttering, but not terrible). Today I was trying to run it from command prompt using the server zip file provided by the devs, and I was able to get it launching perfectly fine. My friend goes to connect, and he claims it's running even smoother than it was before. Then, when I go to connect (from the same machine as the server is being hosted from), I'm able to load into the game, but the FPS starts at about 30, and rapidly decreases to the sub-5 regime. At this point, I am unable to move my character, and any inventories I attempt to access are instantly and automatically closed. I would very much like to run this as a separate server so that we don't have to deal with sending save files back and forth whenever one of us is playing alone, but as it is, it seems like only my friend is able to play, albeit more smoothly than before. Attached is a screenshot of my F5 menu before giving up for the night. I am running some mods, and a list can be provided upon request.
Thank you for your help.

*Edit 1: I saw some posts on routers causing slowdowns from DDOS protection, though I don't see why that would be the issue since I'm connecting to the same computer. For the sake of ruling it out, I connected to the server using my local IP address (192.168...), my 127.0.0.1 address, and my ddns.net address. All yield the same result. Tests were repeated after disabling DDOS protection on my router.

*Edit 2: Tested increasing minimum latency to 7 (should be equivalent to ~100ms ping) and there was no noticeable difference.

Hello,
This seems like an odd thing to want to do, mainly because you're asking your CPU to now simulate the same world twice on the same machine, rather than just once.
Unless you have a real proper reason for hosting a headless client instead of just hosting the game yourself via the game client, i would not do this.

If you really want to be able to achieve this though (aka, you want the server to be running all of the time so your friend can pop on and play) then you would want to host it somewhere else, PM me if you want to discuss this option further.

I'm not sure that I can agree with that logic. My system as 4 physical cores, and 8 virtual. When I run the server with nobody on it, it holds itself at about 30-50% core usage, and when I log on it spikes to 100%. While that in itself isn't concerning, the issue is being contained to that singular core, leaving 87% of my computer untouched. The Factorio client itself fully consumes yet another core during this process, which I again agree is concerning, but between the two of them I'm only using a grand total of 25% of my machine's processing power. I have access to other computers in between where the two of us live (maybe that will help with ping as well, not that it was an issue before anyway), but their processing power is far less than what my host here can do. I don't expect to find much, but in forming my above reply it occurs to me to investigate multithreading as a solution.
While this is admittedly anecdotal evidence, I have previously been able to manage several simultaneous Minecraft servers before on this machine, while playing on one of them myself.

your pc cant keep up with the server simulation speed so it sacrifices fps for ups. Factorio only uses 1 core for the main simulation

Also keep in mind multiplayer is more demanding for your pc than singleplayer

You can reduce server simulation speed by using the command

Thanks for all the replies. A bit disappointed that my setup can't handle it, but ohh well. I guess we'll go back to transferring save files back and forth and we won't have an always-on server running.

Get some cheap pc for hosting the game, this usually boosts performance on clients (known bug)

Also, do you running out of RAM?

Well, we ended up going with a Multiplay server, which helped out somewhat. The game.speed command definitely worked out better, though at present we have the server running at a whopping 0.37 in order to avoid runaway fps drops for the both of us. Our base is admittedly large, but it is still becoming excruciating to play even on a rented server.

It's a shame you went with Multiplay.
As said in my previous post, you should have PM'ed me (i own a hosting company and can help you out with that)

If multiplay are not up to scratch, I can host your factorio server for you, I can also show you it running on my hardware instead to see if it preforms better than Multiplay.